1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to temperature control technology for chemical applications in general and particularly to a temperature control implementation that provides integrated control circuitry and heating elements that can be manufactured in a semiconductor processing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
Chemical and/or biochemical reactions are ubiquitous and fundamental subjects in both traditional chemistry and the emerging discipline of life science. In general, ambient temperature plays a vital role in characterizing a reaction process. First of all, based on classical chemical kinetics theory, both the reaction rate and the equilibrium constant are determined by temperature for a specific reaction. Moreover, in biochemistry, most reactants as well as enzymes and inhibitors are macro-molecules, whose functionalities are based on their 3-dimensional structures maintained by inter/intra molecular weak interactions, such as hydrogen bonds. Changing temperature, can break and re-form those bonds, and therefore, completely change the chemical activity of those macro-molecules. In research, tremendous attention has been paid to try to precisely regulate temperature for a chemical/biochemical reaction that is investigated. However, these temperature control approaches and designs involve external heating/cooling devices or require complicated micromachining processes to be implemented. A number of problems in response time and in precision of temperature control have been observed.
There is a need for temperature control technology that can provide faster and very precise temperature control.